What is your earliest phonograph memory/what lured you into

[AmberolaAndy]

I can’t really pinpoint what got me interested. As a child I would see antique phonographs in movies and tv occasionally. But the first time I ever saw one in real life was probably during a field trip at a museum. Or somebody brought one to school and demonstrated it...(This was probably 20+ years ago so my memory is really fuzzy.) Later on, I also remember going to a place. (Can’t remember where it was, probably another museum.) But I remember seeing a graphophone machine behind a glass case and I was awestruck. I thought it looked so cool. And I remember thinking “There’s no way I’ll be able to get one of those!” I also watched a lot of the history channel as a kid, and the Modern Marvels episode on the Phonograph was one of my favorites. I didn’t know anybody personally that had a wind-up phonograph or any record player for that matter. (This was in the 90s and early 2000s when most people got rid of their records and turntables for CD players.) It’s just something I got interested in on my own accord. And I’m glad I did! I also still don’t own a graphophone...YET.

[Marty Bufalini]

I was probably about 11 or 12 and fibbed about my age so I could get a paper route. We had to collect from our customers every Friday and we had a lot of change. There was a hardware store at the end of my route where the owner would change the coins into bills for me. The place was an absolute mess. I mean, Mrs. Ureel, the owner was the only one who could find anything in the place. Her husband did handy work and plumbing and had the opportunity to get into basements, attics, etc. He would either be given antiques or take them as partial payment. This was in the early '60s before this stuff became "hot" and was still considered junk.

Anyway, I would count out my change on the top of a huge upright phonograph of some kind. All I remember is that it was very dark wood and had enough room on top to count out the change. I had no idea what it was so I asked her, she told me and, played it for me.

I was hooked and had to have a phonograph. Being a history buff even at that age, I felt the thing spoke to me from the distant past and I was fascinated.

From then on, I would scour the want ads. I finally found one not from from my house. It was a "best offer" deal. I called the guy, offered him all I had saved at that point -- all of $15.00 -- and he said he'd call back if that was the best offer.

I waited on pins and needles all that Sunday. I finally got a call that evening telling me I was the best offer!!!

After begging my older brother, he finally agreed to drive me over to pick it up.

It was a floor model mahogany Victor XI. My family thought I was nuts -- but they still do!!!


I still have that same XI

[Phototone]

I was very young, maybe 5 or 6. Upstairs at my maternal grandfathers house was a Upright Columbia Grafonola. I was fascinated with it. His wife would play it for me, and Eventually I would play it myself. That was in 1956 or so. Grandfather died in 1958, and eventually we acquired the phonograph and records which were records my mother would have played during her high school years. I still have this machine and the records. Back then after I got this, my dad would get me another machine from time to time, if I bugged him enough. That was when $25 was big money for a machine. I remember 78rpm records going for 5 cents each. We bought cylinders for 50 cents each. Ah those were the days.

[Lucius1958]

It was the early '60s; I must have been 4 or 5. My grandmother demonstrated a little, hand-cranked toy gramophone to my brother and me: I remember it as being red, and probably plastic. To this day, I have never been able to track down that toy.

Bill

[Edisonfan]

Twelve years ago, when I bought my Edison S-19 Diamond Disc Phonograph, and have been hooked ever since.

[Menophanes]

I have always been fascinated by old things, especially if they can still be used for their original purpose; they have been, and still are, a kind of consolation for the fact that I cannot travel backwards in time as I have longed to do ever since I could think. Gramophones and phonographs were an obvious focus for this enthusiasm, both because I loved music and because they were very widely available when I was young.

When I was about six years old, I was allowed to play with a portable gramophone. I do not know the make or model, but I think the covering of the case was printed with a multicoloured floral design. With it was a record of an old English folk-song, 'Oh no, John, no'; the singer may well have been Paul Robeson, since he had this piece in his repertoire, but I have no direct memory of this. My father had a few other 78s, including Yehudi Menuhin's first record (Fiocco's 'Allegro'), but it was some years before these came within my reach.

By the time I was ten, I had a gramophone of my own, an H.M.V. Model 103 table machine in oak, bought from a schoolfellow. An old lady who baby-sat for the family gave me my first three records. The No. 4 sound-box was damaged, the needle-arm having pulled itself out of the diaphragm; I constantly had to repair this with adhesive tape, but it just as constantly broke down again and collapsed onto the record, which received a fresh gouge every time. Over the next ten years or so I got through a number of gramophones, including a Columbia open-horn machine and a floor-standing cabinet (branded 'Academy') whose internal horn pointed straight downwards. I say 'got through' because I assumed for years that when the mainspring broke (as it always did) there was nothing to be done except to scrap the machine. However, there was always a transitional period when I kept the broken gramophone in service by pushing the turntable round with a finger on the central area of the record. I could keep this up for hours and once played in this fashion right through the 1937 set of Mozart's 'Magic Flute' conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham (about 18 records). As a result of this my right-hand fore and middle fingers are misshapen – bent to the right – to this day.

Also very early in my life, the family visited a small museum in Ilfracombe (Devonshire, south-west England) during a holiday. Most of the exhibits were natural curiosities (I remember a two-headed kitten) preserved under glass domes, but there was also an Edison phonograph, probably a Home, and this is certainly the first that I ever saw. I think I must have mistaken the feed-screw for the record itself, since I carried away the impression that cylinders were very narrow in proportion to their length, so that I was very surprised when I first saw pictures of actual cylinders. At twelve I bought (for £5) my own phonograph, a respectable Edison Standard A.

Oliver Mundy.

[AmberolaAndy]

By the time I was ten, I had a gramophone of my own, an H.M.V. Model 103 table machine in oak, bought from a schoolfellow. An old lady who baby-sat for the family gave me my first three records. The No. 4 sound-box was damaged, the needle-arm having pulled itself out of the diaphragm; I constantly had to repair this with adhesive tape, but it just as constantly broke down again and collapsed onto the record, which received a fresh gouge every time.

My first machine that I bought in 2008 (a portable with a brand name so obscure there’s very little info online about it) had this same exact issue with it’s soundbox. Eventually I got tired of it falling apart so I set it aside for a few years. And played my 78s electrically. I had also got three other machines around 2009-10 that weren’t much better. A Birch portable that had a swollen potmetal tonearm wich I eventually parted out. This thing was so cheap the horn was made out of heavy cardboard! A frankenphone which somebody repurposed an old shipping crate to make a case and took parts from an upright offbrand Mandel machine to make it into a tabletop. The home made horn is too small so it doesn’t sound very good. And a no name brand portable from the 1930s I think might be a Sears silvertone but the hardened back flange on its soundbox wouldn’t stay in place and would cause it to slip while playing back a record. This was all I could afford at the time and I had very little knowledge. It took me until 2016 where I started making enough to afford the name brand machines. And ever since then I’ve only bought Edison and Victor machines. And even my first name brand machine an Edison diamond disc London console is considered the most unpopular DD model by collectors.

[marcapra]

I'm a late comer to this hobby. I've been a record collector since the late 60s though, but they were mostly LPs. I never saw any antique phonographs anywhere when I was younger even though I went to Goodwill a lot to buy clothes and other necessities. I remember going down in the basement of the San Diego Goodwill downtown to look for records. They had some 78s, but it was always things like Bach's Mass in B minor, or the 1943 Decca album of Oklahoma! Never any 20s or jazz records. This was in the early 70s. I never saw any antique phonographs either. Then in 2000, I watched the Ken Burns documentary on Jazz. In the early episodes of that series, they show some people playing ODJB recordings of things like Livery Stable Blues on an old table top Victrola. So I started going to old record stores and buying old 78 jazz records and a record player that could play 78s. After a while I started looking on Ebay and saw that it was possible to actually buy and antique phonograph. My first was a Victrola Consolette orthophonic . This was in about 2003.

[VanEpsFan1914]

Great stories, everyone!

(I wish goodwills near me had stuff like Bach's Mass in B Minor.)

I was lured into phonographs gradually--at the antique store that used to be in town, back in 2007, I got to hear a VV-IX from 1912 playing the Pasadena Day March--or On, Wisconsin! though I don't remember which. I was not tall enough to see the record going round.

Then I saw a Crap-O at the museum in town, because they thought it was a real one. So did I.

I remember Grandma Mary talking about a "Victrola" (she was born in 1921) and I thought that it was a dumb name for a record player but it was cool that it played without electric current and was able to dispense with the big horn on top.

The Victrola XIV-E (1914) that I use to this day was purchased in 2016 when I realized that (1) the dealers weren't going to be able to sell it, (2) I had lawn money and some spare time, and (3) it was slated for destruction if I did not buy it. So I bought it. I gave them $250, found out it wouldn't fit in the Corolla...so I left it sitting in the parking lot and drove home to commandeer my dad's six-cylinder Toyota 4-wheel-drive!

THAT got it home all right. Dad figured out what happened to his truck very soon (I had just gotten my license) and he came be-boppin' down the hall about an hour after I had cleared the wreckage of shoehorning a broken Victrola into my bedroom. His words:

"Ooooh! You got the Victrola. Does it still work?"

Of course it broke the second day I owned it, so now it is restored inside (outside is still shabby) and I love it. Sounds great.

I don't know why the big uprights are so low priced. They sound awesome and who doesn't need more record storage?

[coyote]

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